That wasn't my intent at the outset, but it was what happened as I decided to
sell a low-cap stock I picked up months ago that was surging on the back of
the COVID-19 Pandemic. I strongly suspect the stock still had plenty of room
to keep growing, and certainly when I bought in, I intended to hold the stock
for the long term. However, the more I learned about the fundamentals of the
company in question, the less good I felt about owning even a relatively small
stake in their success.

They are a local restaurant food deliver service, in the same space as UberEats
or DoorDash. The seem to differ primarily through a focus on smaller markets than
either of their over-capitalized competitors, and I decided to invest early this
year as a customer of the company who felt, from what I'd seen, that they were
partnering with local restaurants in many markets around the country, and I'd
been using the service rarely, but consistently for several years. I felt that
their low stock price was more a signal of a bad investor pumping and dumping
them into the IPO, and as a publicly traded company they were being held
to different standards than their tightly-held competitors.

That was all true, but as I started learning more about the fundamentals of
Waitr's relationship with the restaurants, I found myself not wanting to
be a shareholder. I'm not even sure I'll continue to be a customer.

Ranjan Roy recently published a post about DoorDash, and how they were
bringing delivery to a pizzaria that had never contracted with
DoorDash, and
in doing, were causing customers to be upset due to poor service, that this
restaurant wasn't even offering. He goes on to discuss the incredible quantity
of money that DoorDash loses every quarter, as they scramble to reach scale.

This article was the thing that pushed me over the edge. I knew Waitr was
losing money, though I had believed they had a way to profitability. I also
firmly believe that Waitr has not, and under current leadership, will not, engage
in the kind of "trial run" shenanigans that DoorDash was engaged in, but the
reminder of how fundamental the problems in this space were was enough to
spur me to action.

However, I'd already decided to sell, even before the article, because it was
becoming increasingly clear that Waitr's path to profitability was not built on
partnership with the Restaurants they work with, but rather via a parasitic
relationship that, long term, was only going to harm the restaurants.

What were these new terms? 30% of the gross of every transaction run through
the restaurant. Plus $0.30 + 3.01% of each transaction in credit card handling
fees. They've gotten a lot of flak over the credit card handling, but those
rates are similar (though slightly higher) than what Square, a company that
specializes in payments, takes for e-commerce, though it is probably quite
a bit higher than what most restaurants pay for their own in-store fees.
Credit Card processing on the Internet is riskier (more fraud), so the
processors charge more.

I suspect there are people out there trying to build Food Delivery businesses
built on flat fees, which would be more fair to Restaurants. However, with
Restaurants frequently raising their in-app
prices
in an effort to break even, and consumers increasingly catching on to this
practice, I no longer think that the industry has legs at all. Not to
mention that without dedicated delivery infrastructure, most restaurants just
aren't set up to deliver on quality the food they ultimately deliver.

It also ruins the dining experience of many restaurants. These restaurants
often have to set aside parts of their dining areas for delivery drivers
to loiter while they wait for food to be packaged. This costs them tables in
those spaces, but the loitering drivers also tie up waitstaff or the host
station, making the dining in experience less valuable and desirable.

If you care about restaurants, order from them directly. These delivery
services aren't getting these restaurants more exposure. They're leeching
off the restaurant's already thin margins, and this will only end with
fewer restaurants.

There has been a lot of buzz about the idea of Tuition-Free Public Universities
this year, as this idea has worked it's way into what is almost certainly going
to be the DNC platform for the election in 2020. I get that. While I have been
fortunate enough to have had a job good enough to pay off all of my own, but
also my wife's student loans by my early 30s, a lot of people are drowning in
debt, and either un- or under-employed.

I am incredibly glad that this discussion appears to be focused on Public
Universities, as that at least suggests that if this comes to pass, it won't
just be a way to enrich low-performing private colleges (or Real Estate funds
masquerading as colleges), at the expense of students.

I think that approaching the problem of rising costs of a university education
by moving Tuition onto the tax payer is premature, because we have problems in
our Education system nationally that such a program is likely to make much
worse, and in so doing, make many of our biggest national challenges, even
harder.

To begin, I'd like to take a look at one of the nations with free college that
people often point to as an example in these discussions: Germany. The German
model does work reasonably well in Germany, that is true, though there have been
concerns that the system is unsustainable for years. In
fact, several German states attempted to institute nominal tuition fees in the
early oughts, though they had to roll that back due to massive push-back.
Which is simply to say that Germany's system has some scaling issues that they
haven't worked out yet, and we need to be aware of that.

So why do I oppose this? I believe that any system of free tuition will make
income inequality, particularly as it applies to students of color, worse. If
we don't address the inherent inequities in our primary and secondary schooling
systems, we stand to do more harm than good.

Our Public Schools are principally funded by property taxes. Black
Neighborhoods tend to have lower property values, even
after you control for basically everything (home's are comparable,
neighborhoods have same amenities, crime rates, etc). On average nationally,
this amounts to around $48,000 less in value per home. Because generally
speaking, White People don't want to live in "Black" neighborhoods. Even
relatively affluent, middle class black neighborhoods.

As a result of this, even when you compare relatively poor neighborhoods, which
have frequently self-selected for race (or been helped along by red-lining),
poor white schools have, on average, $1,500 more per student than poor black
schools. For non-poor (but still segregated due to neighborhood
dynamics) schools, that figure nears $2,000 per student. More funding translates
to better resources, smaller class sizes; all things that lead to better
educational outcomes.

Failure to address this basic inequity means that Black students remain at a
disadvantage when entering Universities because their primary and secondary
education likely wasn't as good. Pair this with the likely outcome that already
over stressed public universities will need to raise their admissions standards.

There are a lot of factors that play into the rise of tuition costs. Certainly,
ready availability of loans is part of it. One piece that I don't think gets
enough attention is the increase in student populations, which all require extra
resources above what state funding levels (which have been steadily decreasing)
provide. In the 1970s, only about 47% of the population went to college. Today,
that number is well over 80%. This is also down from a peak of
over 90% in 2011.

Since the 1970s, the US Population has also increased by ~100 Million people,
putting the number of people who's attended tertiary education from ~94 Million,
to 240 Million. According to Washington State University's Institutional
Research figures, even as overall student participation rates have been
dropping nationwide, WSU has seen a roughly 15% increase in it's enrollment
numbers, while tuition rates have dropped about 8% for in-state students, and
risen 2% for out-of-state students (I also have no idea how primarily
state-funded schools are intended to navigate this free-tuition mandate with
regard to in-state versus out-of-state students, but I don't think anyone else
does either). It's also worth noting that, on a longer time scale, WSU's
population since 2001 (when I entered college), has increased 37%, while it's
in-state tuition rates have increased by ~270%.

Free tuition, by removing a primary as a means to control the cost of growth,
will likely lead to higher enrollment standards, which will only serve to
increase the gap that poor people already struggle to overcome, but which
impacts people of color in the US even more than it does Whites. Until we are
more equitable in our primary and secondary education, our tertiary education
systems will only serve to widen an already too wide gap. The tools we use to
gauge students are already demonstrated to be gameable and disadvantageous
to poor or non-white students; this will only get worse as minimum entry
standards rise.

A university education is too expensive. This is unquestionable. This comes from
many factors, from increased demand due to larger student populations (and the
idea that without a college degree, you can't succeed that is pushed hard on
high school students), to inefficiencies in administration, to reduction in
state-level support in many places. Efforts to increase student access to a
college education has instead largely increased the debt load for students who
aren't seeing the increased opportunity that was implied when they were
encouraged to take on that debt. More open access to loans has contributed to
higher costs, though I do tend to think that results more of a factor of
increased utilization than institutional greed, outside of the for-profit
colleges.

Returning for a moment to Germany, it's worth noting that many students in that
country choose (or are pushed toward) secondary schools when they enter the
fifth grade that indicate whether or not they are expected to be on path toward
university. While German students have, since the 1970s, been migrating from
the more general Hauptschulen to the more advanced Realschulen, over half of the
students in Germany tended to attend the Hauptschulen for a minimal general
education, with barely over 10% of students in the university-bound Gymnasien
by 2000. In the decades since, the university population has continued to grow,
but it still looks likely that the percentage of German students that end up in
Universities is less than 20% of the population. Compare this to the roughly 70%
of American High School graduates who were enrolled in college in
2018.

I can't speak to the quality of German Hauptschulen or Realschulen compared to
US High Schools. However, the idea that American's would accept that we were
going to offer free tuition to all, but were going to cap enrollments to 20%
of the High School Graduate population instead of the 70% we have today, is
laughable. And it runs counter to what many people would expect, though it's
the reality of the system people most frequently point to when discussing
this issue.

Prioritizing education is critical to the future of our nation. However we have
to shore up the base of our system. Make it more evenly distributed. Ensure
that the opportunities we provide are more based on merit and ability than the
confounding factors of the circumstances of birth and generational wealth. We
can't solve our education problems from the top down, we need to start from the
bottom up to ensure that everyone has access to the same opportunities, to
control for race and other factors, we stand to more deeply entrench our
problems.

This reminder was in the form of the recent reading I've been doing of Over The
Edge, a role-playing game set in an alternate history where magic, psychic
powers, and other weird phenomena exist, but aren't widely known. Like Vampire,
the history of this world is long and that requires the reframing of certain
events in ways that are likely to offend some. For Over The Edge, this passage
stood out to me immediately:

In the meantime, the Pharaohs had arranged the discovery and colonization of
the New World, seeing to it that religious misfits, debtors, and desperate
adventurers came to populate the northern continent. The Pharaohs arranged the
slaughter of the natives so as to have a land without history where they would
have maximum power to experiment. (The scheme to mix New and Old World
cultures in South America failed miserably.)
&mdash Over The Edge (2nd Edition), Johnathan Tweet, 1997

I haven't fully read the 2019 Third Edition of Over the Edge, but a quick skim
does suggest that the above hasn't really been retconned, but definitely doesn't
get the attention it got in the Second Edition.

Now, OTE Second Edition was released in 1997, and the atrocities that it
reframes were mostly centuries old (though obviously there are far more recent
issues with the treatment on indigenous peoples in the Americas deep into the
20th Century with lesser evils continuing to this day), so perhaps this never
generated so much attention because of where we were culturally, or due to the
distance from the events being portrayed.

However, there are other historical events from Vampire that are widely
reframed. The Spanish Inquisition is framed as a mass revolt of Humanity, using
the power of the Church, against Vampires. All the various parts of the World
of Darkness were part of World War II, though the text is quick to point out
that those events were initiated from purely human causes, thus demonstrating
some degree of sensitivity to too aggressively re-purposing historical
atrocities within the context of the story.

Finally, I am reminded of the NBC TV Show Grimm, which revealed in the very
first Season that Hitler himself was Wesen (a type of human with a animalistic
nature that most humans are unable to perceive).

By Season 5, Grimm goes so far as to literally describe Hitler as trying to
create a world ruled by Wesen, something which paints a weird view of the world,
particularly given it's also dabbling in a shadow government of "Royal Families"
which regularly works in both the Human and Wesen world.

Grimm's decision here is particularly interesting, because the writers, both by
not having a lot of time (due to TV narrative constraints), but also potentially
due to not really wanting to, end up leaving large enough questions about the
implications of some of these decisions. Why did Wesen Hitler target Jews? Who
knows, it's never discussed. Trying to justify it would absolutely be risky. Not
mentioning it at all, doesn't feel like a better answer.

These issues aren't unique to the stories set in our own world with a few things
changed. All fiction, in order to be accessible to the reader and to have a
sense of familiarity, needs to borrow from our shared culture, causing all
fiction to be viewable through a historic lens.

Which is important. Fiction allows us to investigate the past, to develop
empathy by examining other people's experiences and emotions through their
stories. Role-playing takes that a step further by encouraging us to embody
these characters, and games like Vampire or Monsterhearts, which force us as
players to deal with the tension between monstrosity and humanity...can lead
for some deeply compelling stories.

I suspect the fallout that the Vampire developers received came from a few
sources. First, the atrocities published in the book were (and I think still
are) ongoing. Second, Vampire has long drawn a larger proportion of Queer
players than much of the hobby (particularly when considering how the hobby was
when Vampire first published in 1991). These two factors likely simply led this
to feel like a more direct attack on that community from a product well loved
by much of the community. The fact that the story element seemed to suggest
that Humans weren't behind this very real atrocity, particularly when the
authors have emphatically insisted certain other atrocities weren't perpetrated
primarily by the monstrous forces of the World of Darkness.

I understand White Wolf's decision to remove the references in the Camarilla
book to the Chechen Anti-Gay Purges. It was the correct decision. Certainly
in light of the backlash, but also because the inclusion of the detail was a
mistake. Not only because it is so fresh, but because it did push an evil
humanity was committing against itself onto the monsters of that world. Vampire
may be a game about Monsters, but it's mostly a game about Humans struggling
with the monster inside them. While for the Vampires that monster may be very
real, some people's monsters are more figurative, and games like Vampire need
to be careful to not imply that all human evil is derived from a supernatural
source.

And I think, when it comes to alternate histories, that's the key thing. To
never forget the awful things people do to each other, or excuse them away by
implying that the people who do these things are something other than human.

They may be flawed. They may lack empathy. They may do monstrous things, but
they are, at the end of the day, still Human.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of a continent,
a part of the main.
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne, 1624

In the last few years, in particular, it seems that there has been increased
discussions about the topic of Billionaires. Specifically, discussion about
whether or not there should be any. Many have weighed in on the matter, from
actual Billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Cuban, to Anarchic Socialists
who dream of a world without money.

The center- and right-leaning objections to these proposals have been simple:
"People worked for that wealth, and they shouldn't be denied it." There is some
truth to that position: People did work for that money, and often there was a
significant risk that allowed them to earn it. However, this argument simply
ignores several important details.

Let's take Bill Gates, and his story, as an example, though it's worth noting
that the core points here are basically true of every Billionaire.

First, Gates didn't build Microsoft (the largest source of his fortune) alone.
Excluding the Nokia Acquisition in 2014, by the time Gates largely resigned from
Microsoft that year, Microsoft had around 100,000 employees. Given the natural
retirement and the general churn of employees between jobs in tech these days,
it's probably a conservative estimate to say that Microsoft has had well over a
million employees between it's founding in 1975 and Gates departure in 2014.
Yet only 3 people became Billionaires off of Microsoft (Gates, Allen, Ballmer).

Yes, Microsoft has produced tens of thousands of Millionaires. 12,000 by
2005, but that number is likely quite a bit higher by now, though only that
pre-2015 number is likely to include many who earned more than $10M, often
largely due to pre-IPO stock grants and Microsoft's strong market performance
over the decades.

Did Bill Gates warrant more pay than the average Microsoft employee? Sure; he
had more responsibility and had taken the risk of founding the company. But he
didn't just get more, he got orders of magnitude more. Three to five more orders
of magnitude.

Second, we talk about Billionaires like they came from nothing. Bill Gates's
father was a prominent Seattle Lawyer, his mother served on the boards of
several banks. He attended a private, very expensive private school. He was
at Harvard when he dropped out to found Microsoft. He grew up in substantial
privilege, and he could afford to take the risk on a company like Microsoft in
1975 because if it failed, he knew he wasn't going to starve. Hell, Jeff Bezos
of Amazon got his parents to put up $250,000 in initial funding, and it's never
been intimated that he was seriously risking his parent's future in taking that
money.

Knowing you have an out if things go really badly, even if you tell yourself
you'd never ask your parents for more money, sits there in the back of your
head, it allows you to take risks you might not otherwise, because there is an
out.

So, I do understand why there is some balking at a high tax rate for earnings
over $10,000,000 a year. Even successful entrepreneurs will typically see those
earnings hit in a single big event (company sale, IPO, etc.) and as a result
company sales will be a lot less lucrative. I mean, it's still at least a $10M
payday, but we're still talking about a massive change in the potential payouts
for entrepreneurs. Though anyone who wouldn't found a company because they would
only make ~$10M is frankly, kind of an asshole.

This would be a huge shift in the way America thinks about wealth and the role
wealth has in a greater society.

We need to be rethinking this though.

I have worked for Google for 6 years. Between base salary, stock, bonuses, and
other benefits, I earn somewhere north of $300,000 a year. Somewhat to my
surprise, this actually puts me a bit above the median salary at Google.
It also puts me any my wife in the 97%+ of wage earners in the US. However,
the distance economically from where we are now, from where we were back when
we when I was civil servant making around 1/5 of I make now, is far, far less
than the earnings of the super rich.

The result of all of this has been the intimation that a large number of
entrepreneurs will leave the US if these things become policy. Maybe that's true.
However, the things that these programs could pay for, like Medicare For All,
also stands to remove impediments for a lot of people to start their own
businesses. Plenty of people have medical problems that require fairly high
maintenance costs, enough that having their health insurance tied to their
employment makes starting a business a massive risk.

Does the likelihood that Medicare for All may free a ton of people to start
businesses offset the loss of a relatively few businesses that may grow quite
large? Probably not directly. But it's worth noting that tax laws are changing
internationally to make it a lot harder for companies to move around their
earnings in order to avoid taxes, as much of Tech has done with Ireland
over the years.

However, at the end of the day, the numbers that have been thrown about as the
targets for these higher tax rates are high enough that they will never impact
99.9% of the population. I also don't believe that many entrepreneurs would
choose not to start a business because they'd "only" stand to earn around $10M.

These proposals don't seek to deny people rewards for success. For taking risks.
They simply seek to acknowledge the fact that we live in a society, that we do
not succeed or fail purely on our own, but that there are an enormous number of
factors involved in every success. If people are really intent on preventing
this wealth from being taken by the government in taxes, maybe they'll start
paying better wages, so we might finally see real wages increase again for the
first time since before I was born.

It's probably worthing noting that in the more than seven years since I last
posted to this blog, I have spent six of those years with Google, and
specifically spent two of those years working on Google+. I actually like
Google+ a lot, and am disappointed, though sadly not surprised, at the recent
decision to shut down the consumer-focused Google+ access.

This post isn't really about Google+, though. While it's true that Google+ is
not immune to what I'm talking about here, my thinking on Social Media today
applies pretty evenly to every Social Media site I've ever used (and that dates
back to SixDegrees.com in the late 90s).

My feelings on this are also deeply influenced by what the Internet was when I
was growing up. The Internet of the late 1990s and early 00s was very different
in a great many ways. But what I've been thinking about most recently is the way
that communities tended to be somewhat diffuse, specific, and focused in a way
that modern Social Media doesn't really allow for.

If you were interested in cars, there was a set of car forums you could
participate in. Politics? Computers? Furry Porn? The communities were out there.
They still are, and they are certainly much easier to find than they used to be,
but there is one major difference. Today, those communities exist on Facebook,
Google+, or on hashtags or lists on Twitter.

The problem with that is that it means that all of your communities that you
participate in are tied to a single identity.

Merging identities for productivity is great (I still dislike that I can't
easily merge my work calendar and my personal calendar free/busy data with
reasonable privacy defaults). However, merging identity in social contexts is
a very, very different problem.

We all present ourselves differently to different groups. The way we behave with
close friends is different than co-workers, or church groups, or our parents.
For some people, this can actually be dangerous. Even if
it's not dangerous for you (it's not for me), when everything you believe is
basically a click away from every conversation you particpate in, it means your
communities are constantly bleeding into each other, which can be, if nothing
else, exhausting.

If this had the side effect of breaking down echo chambers, maybe it would have
been worth it. But clearly, it didn't do that.

In fact, I think it might have made it worse. When everything you might disagree
with anyone on is always a half-step away, I suspect it causes people to be more
defensive, and thus more likely to double-down on disagreements, and more
inclined to apply purity tests. I think it drives people further into their
echo chambers, because it becomes impossible to step out even for a minute, and
there starts to be little incentive to do so.

And giving people space to step out of their echo chambers is the only proven
way to get anyone to actually
change their mind about anything.

While I may question the tactics of harassing Mitch McConnel while he's out to
dinner (it makes him look like a victim to some people who might be otherwise
convinced), I understand why people are doing it.

And this post has gotten far more political than I intended when I started
writing it. But that's almost the point. Social Media, the fact that it is
broken, and very likely the ways in which it is broken, are very likely linked
to where we're at politically today. Yes, there have always been
Nazis in America, and Nazis are really skilled at
exercising their power in an outsized manner. However, Social
Media has proven an effective tool for disinformation (that target
both sides, as they're interested in the chaos). That disinformation has helped
sow distrust that plays into that already polarizing nature of these services.

I'm not sure what the way to fix this is. Allowing people to manage multiple
identies on these mega-services is difficult, as it can become hard for the user
to keep track of the current context they're in (we've all sent chat messages
to the wrong people before). With smaller, more focused services, we had better
visual signals. Doing this at scale for the large services is likely unworkable.
You try telling your visual designers they need to build something in a dozen
different color schemes that users can switch between at will (and even just
switching color schemes doesn't really solve the problem).

Giving community participants more freedom on how they present themselves to
that community is an important step to allowing users to move between
communities. People who are regularly moving between communities are exposed to
more ideas, more different ways of viewing the world, more different kinds of
people in general. That is healthy.

Online Communties in the 90s and 00s had plenty of problems. We pretty much all
assumed that people we were interacting with where cisgendered, heterosexual
white men between 16 and 25. Rarely questioned that assumption unless someone
made an issue of it. Unfortunately, particularly at the time, we seemed to
usually be right, which had the side effect of pushing people who didn't match
that list of characteristics to pretend they did in order to match the
community norms. We, the Default People, defined those norms
after all. And trust me, the Default People like to complain when challenged.
I've seen countless influential tech people hemmorage followers when they start
getting Political on Twitter.

For people who fall outside that default (a term I'm only using sarcastically,
and am stopping using because the idea of default is inherently limiting), I do
think modern Social Media has made finding "their people" easier. Community
discovery is just so much better than it used to be, and these sites make
walking the social graph easier to help build these communties more easily. That
has unquestionably done a lot of good for a lot of people, even if it sometimes
forces those people to fully present themselves, even in contexts where it may
not have mattered otherwise. This need to fully present oneself at all times,
may well have contributed to the many discussions around representation and
opportunity presented to women, people of color, and the transgender
participants in our broader communities.

While I believe it's got to be possible to allow people some more freedom to
limit how they present themselves into smaller, more focused communties, that we
can move between and discover with some ease (easily creating new isolated
sub-identities we can use within these more focused communities), it is vitally
important that we do so in a way that combats the idea of any group of people
being default (unless, I suppose, if the community is targeted based on
demographics, I guess).

I actually think this has something to do with the rise of Slack and Discord,
particularly among younger users. Discord servers tend to be somewhat focused,
and while you can see mutual servers you have in common with other users, you
can't just see all the servers they belong to, giving you a lot more
flexibility (though since you only have one identity across all servers, you
can incidentally link to people across communities who may or may not respect
any separation you'd prefer to keep between those communties). I suspect Slack
is similar, but honestly, I've never really used it. I've barely used Discord.

There are so many confounding factors present in whether things are better or
worse, or how they are better or worse. Where Social Media, and how it's evovled
over the last decade, precisely fits into both the positives and negatives are
really hard to judge. Maybe some community isolation and mobility wouldn't help
anything (and would add discoverability impediments that could actually harm
those in need of smaller communities). The privilege of having belonged to the
default group (at least for the English-speaking world online) absolutely taints
my thinking, so I must acknoweldge that my gut reaction may be entirely flawed.

Still, things can be better, and I am increasingly convinced that it will take a
major shift in the way we, both the users and the platform owners of these large
social media sites, think about how we want to build our communities moving
forward. The status quo certainly doesn't seem to be working for anyone.